Understanding Developmental Psychology

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David Foster Wallace's "Tense Present" is many things: a book review, a self-reflection, an introduction to a field of rarefied knowledge, a broad overview of a professional debate, a rhetorical analysis and more. At the same time, the essay conveys Wallace’s unbridled enthusiasm for issues of grammar and language usage: he is a self-described and unapologetic grammar geek, and his essay flaunts and celebrates his passion.

WHAT ARE WE DOING?

For this assignment, I want you to embrace your inner (or outer) geek, to write on a topic about which you are deeply knowledgeable and deeply passionate.  You should take as your focus something that you know well (this is not a research paper), and that a general audience will not know as well as you do.  While this could be something you’ve studied in school (the tensile strength of spider silk, gestalt principles in graphic design, a particular principle of game theory), it could also be something you’ve studied on your own (lily propagation, caramelized onions, the piano playing of Cecil Taylor, hiking in the Sierra).

The essay will be both explanatory and celebratory. One goal of your essay is to convey a specific sense of why this concept/idea/experience is so captivating/interesting/cool. A second purpose—which will be necessary to the success of the first—is to convey information or knowledge about your subject.

Note that, in his essay, Wallace writes in a number of different modes. He provides information, explains, tells stories, evaluates, analyzes, tells jokes, etc.  In order to convey your sense of enthusiasm, you might find yourself adopting several or all of these modes as well.

While you do not have to, you may incorporate some material about yourself into the paper. Keep in mind, however, that the paper is not about you. Whatever material you include in the paper (personal or otherwise) must help you to develop the reader’s understanding of the appeal of your subject.

The paper should not be a how-to paper.  Note as well that this is not a research paper—you are not going out and learning new information to convey to your reader. Ideally, you’ll write primarily from your own knowledge and experience.  Of course, you may need to look something up, or find that you want to incorporate material from elsewhere to supplement the ideas you are developing. If you do incorporate any materials (ideas, information, or language) from outside sources, you must properly quote or paraphrase this material and properly cite it.  You must also store copies of any material you consult while preparing the essay, whether or not that material ends up in your paper, in your Google Drive.

I am not prescribing a specific format for the paper. You do not necessarily need a thesis statement, though your paper should focus on a clear idea and should be organized in a way that helps the reader understand the attraction of your subject. In class, we will look at a number of models that illustrate possible organizational strategies.

WHO ARE WE WRITING TO?

You are writing as a relative expert to a group of educated people who do not know your subject well—your peers in this class are a good target group. You can’t assume that your audience shares the technical or specialized knowledge that you possess, so you will necessarily need to explain certain concepts, ideas, etc. At the same time, your goal is not necessarily to deliver a technical understanding, but rather to help this audience appreciate your subject and understand what makes it so captivating. You can imagine that this is the sort of writing that might appear in a magazine like The Atlantic or The New Yorker, or that might inform any number of informative podcasts like Radiolab or This Podcast Will Kill You., etc.

WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?

This assignment allows us to practice a number of important skills that writers apply in different situations beyond the context of undergraduate academic writing, including:

• Using an awareness of your audience to inform your content, organization, and style
• Using the writing process to identify, narrow, and develop a topic
• Adapting academic writing skills to non-academic writing situations
• Translating expert knowledge for non-expert audiences
• Developing ideas using detailed evidence and explanation

CHOOSING A TOPIC

You must submit a topic proposal, at least one paragraph indicating what you want to write about, why it interests you, what you already know about this subject, and potential challenges/problems you foresee encountering with the topic. I would suggest that the more narrowly you can define your topic, the easier your job as a writer will be. While Wallace takes 20+ pages, you have only 1250-1500 words. It’s also very likely that as you pre-write, draft, and revise, your topic will narrow substantially. 

You will also read two shorter essays—Charles Simic’s essay on tomatoes and Marc Ribot’s essay on guitar distortion—both of which also convey a sense of passion. Looking at these essays, and engaging in our discussions of these essays, may help you to focus on and narrow potential topics.

Please note that once I approve your topic, you may narrow it down (i.e. make it more specific), but you cannot change it.

PROCESS MEMO

For this, and for each of the major papers, after you complete your final draft you will type a one-page discussion (in well-developed paragraphs—this should not be a list) that explores and reflects upon some of the processes you went through in developing your paper. You might consider, for example, challenges you faces in developing the paper, how you approached this paper differently than you did previous papers, how your sense of your topic changed over the course of writing your paper, etc. Develop your ideas in detail (write more about fewer things, as opposed to less about more things). Your goal here is not to describe your process (i.e. not to tell the reader what you did), but rather to reflect  on what you did so that you (and your reader) can develop a clearer sense of how you operate as a writer.

You may wish to consult the Short Guide to Reflective Writing in the Files/Readings section of Canvas.

GRADING CONCERNS

The assignment has the following process points associated with it:

Complete topic proposal submitted on time – 5 points

Full-length rough draft submitted on time– 10 points

Process memo; evidence of substantial revision able to be seen between rough and final drafts – 10 points

The final draft will be worth 75 points.

Along with written feedback, I will attach a completed copy of this grading rubric to help identify the areas where the paper succeeds and where it would benefit from additional work: